


ariadne's string

by PitViperOfDoom



Series: assistant archivist au [4]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Jon Works for Gertrude Robinson, Love Beats the Lonely, M/M, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, People as Anchors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24069118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PitViperOfDoom/pseuds/PitViperOfDoom
Summary: The Lonely has lurked in Gerard's shadow for as long as he can remember.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Jonathan Sims
Series: assistant archivist au [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1774198
Comments: 30
Kudos: 535





	ariadne's string

**Author's Note:**

> This story is in the same continuity as [burn one bridge and build another](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22960249) and [drawn by necessity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23264812). You don't technically need to read those before this one, but also I am very proud of them and as long you're here for JonGerry content you might as well, you know?

The thing is, Gerard knows he’s Lonely bait. Maybe he always has been.

For all that his mother thumbed her nose at the ivory-tower occult crowd, she’d been comfortable enough taking a few pages from the Lukas family’s playbook. By the time Gerard was old enough to start forming opinions of his own, she had already kept him well insulated from the world outside the one she was trying to build. It makes sense, somewhat. Cutting off outside influence is a good step toward micromanaging the heir to your would-be dynasty of fear, until you remember that one of those fears feeds on isolation.

He doesn’t bother wondering if Mum ever grasped that. Her intentions don’t matter when he’s still left to deal with the consequences of being her son. Everyone has weak spots, no matter how clever or knowledgeable they are, and this just happens to be his.

The knowledge sticks in his throat, tough as shoe leather, but he learns to breathe around it. He knows the counters to various Powers thanks to his lessons growing up. For more than one of them, the secret is having a decent anchor. Something, or better yet someone, tethering you to the here and now, leading you back home like thread in a labyrinth.

Sometimes he thinks of that woman in Genoa. He thinks of the icy vapor clinging to her at the edges, of the glare in her eyes when he questioned her about her anchors. No friends, no lovers, no family but her mother—and didn’t his heart clench when he heard that. Didn’t he think, _no one but her mother, just like me_.

Except she wasn’t like him. He wouldn’t know about it for years to come, but she wasn’t anything like him, because her mother was enough to save her from the empty fog. He hadn’t known that as he watched her walk out of the cafe, but he had hoped. It’s always been his greatest his hope that other people don’t have to be anything like him.

He has never had hope for himself. There was no anchor for Gerard Keay; his mother made sure of that. Isolation was all he knew, and if the Lonely ever decided to swallow him, there was no one that he loved enough to pull him out of its throat.

When love creeps into his life at last, he barely notices its arrival.

It’s sudden at first, bright and full of promises, and Gerard is so busy blinking away the spots in his eyes that he misses it for what it is. But then it finishes its arrival on tiptoe, so quiet and unobtrusive that Gerard hardly realizes it’s there, until Jon comes limping back to him from certain death, and the relief hits like he’s lying between hammer and anvil.

 _Here is Jonathan Sims,_ some part of him sings out when he kisses Jon. _Here is someone who will_ _care_ _if I live or die._

When Jon kisses him back, the tune shifts. _Here is someone that I am terrified to lose._

Jon is a breath of fresh air after a lifetime drowning in muck. He is relief and comfort in a world that taught Gerard to trust neither.

Those old lessons take hold sometimes, reminding him that it cannot last, that happiness is fleeting in a world stalked by fear. When that happens he turns his face away from it, buries it in Jon’s shoulder instead, breathes in the smell of him as Jon carries on about the care of succulents or the history of Egyptian textiles or the difference between essence and extracts, until the noise in Gerard’s head is buried in Jon’s words.

 _I’_ _m going to_ _lose him,_ he thinks, but it doesn’t really take hold until he’s staring down Jon’s limp body in a hospital bed.

 _I’m going to lose him,_ he thinks, and this time there are no words to drown it out. His hand hovers near Jon’s, never touching. He wants to, wants it so desperately that it hurts, but the last time his hands touched Jon was after dragging him out of the water onto that cold wet dock, feeling the sickening crack of broken cartilage as he pumped saltwater from his lungs. Gerard aches to close the distance, to grip Jon’s hand like a vice and feel the pulse in his wrist, to remind himself that he hasn’t lost him _yet_ , but the desire brings the thought of bone shattering beneath his touch. And so he lets his hand rest close enough to feel the warmth from Jon’s, but it’s a pale substitute for arms around him, for fingers running through his hair, for all the touch and warmth and closeness that he needs to scatter the fog.

It’s his own fault, in the end. It’s his fault Jon is hurt and his fault Jon is in danger more often than not, and that means it’s his fault he’s alone when he goes back to the institute. Only Gertrude is there, but if Gerard stays in that hospital or in the empty flat he shares with Jon any longer then he’ll go mad.

So it’s his fault he’s alone when he sees Lukas’s smiling face.

It’s his fault that there’s nothing to dispel the fog when it rolls in to claim him at last.

* * *

By the time Jon wakes up, Gerry is already gone. By the time the hospital releases him and he runs straight to the institute, so is Peter Lukas.

Jon remembers him. The face of his first real brush with the Powers since childhood is not one he’d soon forget. He remembers the broad smile, the jovial voice, saying “I’m a bit excited, actually. It’s not often Elias lets me get away with this!”

He remembers the Lonely. The less said about that, the better.

“You’ll resent me for saying this,” Gertrude says mildly as she watches him pace her office. “But I’m almost relieved that Peter left before he could run into you.”

Jon rounds on her, forgetting himself in his agitation. “Why?”

“Because even if he were here, there is nothing you could say or do to convince him to release Gerard from the Lonely,” Gertrude replies. “And that includes lunging for his throat, which I’m fairly certain is your only plan, at this point.”

Jon seethes quietly. “Isn’t there something we can do? You’re always going on about how stupid and arrogant and short-sighted he is.”

“And that makes him more dangerous, not less,” Gertrude tells him. “He thinks nothing of consequences. It allows him to be rash, like a child acting on a whim.”

“A child isn’t dangerous,” Jon points out.

“A child swinging a hammer can still do a great deal of damage,” says Gertrude.

“But you’re the Archivist!” Jon argues. “More to the point, you’re—you’re bloody _Gertrude Robinson!_ Every cultist and follower we’ve ever dealt with has been afraid of you! Couldn’t you _make_ him do it?”

Gertrude sighs harshly. “Not all of them fear me, Jonathan,” she says. “Some of them simply hate me.”

“Lukas is afraid of you.”

“And it didn’t stop him from vanishing _you_ on a whim, did it? I cannot _make_ him do anything. The only one who can is Elias.”

“And we both know he won’t help,” Jon nearly snarls.

“Thank goodness we haven’t _needed_ his help thus far.”

In spite of his best efforts to remain still, Jon still shakes with helpless anger. He envies Gertrude’s glacial poise, even as a small part of him resents it. “How can you be so calm about this?”

Gertrude finally looks up, eyes hawk-sharp for a moment. When they settle on Jon’s face, they nearly soften for a split second before she looks aways. “Gerard has been facing the entites for far longer than you have. He knows how to counter the Lonely. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one who taught _you_ , after a fashion.”

 _Then why isn’t he back yet?_ Jon bites back the question so hard that his jaw aches. “Is there _nothing_ we can do?” he asks.

“The Lonely is an insidious fear,” Gertrude reminds him. “But it can be countered by connections between people. Do you think Gerard has the connections necessary to pull himself out?”

“I…” Jon’s heart twists. “I-I think so.” There’s Gertrude, and Gerry likes Gertrude, they get along well enough even if Gerry keeps her at arm’s length. And then there’s him.

With Gertrude’s shrewd gaze boring into him, another thread of hope comes to him. “There’s—there’s something,” Jon says. “We made a recording, a while ago. You showed me a statement about the Stranger—Rose Cooper, I think? Her mother was replaced with an impostor, and no one noticed but her. We thought it’d be a good idea to take precautions against that—polaroids, recordings of our voices. He should still have his, so maybe…” His voice trails off. He can’t think of any reason Gerry _wouldn’t_ have it with him. A physical reminder can’t hurt, as long as the connection is strong.

It has to be strong enough. He—he _loves_ Gerry. He knows he does, and he thinks, he _hopes,_ that Gerry knows it too. Jon does his best to show it, but he knows from past failures that sometimes the ways that he says it aren’t ways that others can hear.

But he’s _tried_. Because sometimes Gerry makes him feel like he could walk into the Lonely and out again without even a shiver, and Jon doesn’t know how to tell him that to his face, so the best he can do is try to make him feel the same way.

But Gerry has been gone for three days now. Jon’s nerves itch to act, but if there is a way to reach into the Lonely and drag someone out, he doesn’t know it.

“How many statements on the Lonely are there, in the Archives?” Jon asks.

Gertrude sighs. “Many. Though I don’t know if they’ll hold the information you want.”

“I’ll find it,” Jon says, with the steady quiet of simple fact.

He is, after all, a very good researcher.

* * *

The world is familiar in two ways. The first is that it matches the world he left behind, even if the buildings are just a bit taller, the streets just a bit wider. The second is that it is nothing more or less than all of Gerard’s childhood fears and insecurities made manifest.

Not long after Mum’s pages were burned, Jon showed him #0102503, Statement of Andrea Nunis. None other than the woman in Genoa. The world she was thrown into was not an empty one, quite the opposite. It was crowded, full of… not people, but something very close to people. And that makes sense, if you think about it. To be alone in an empty world is only natural, but to be alone when surrounded by people is a special sort of horror.

Gerard knows that horror well.

At least the faces around him aren’t screaming. They’re simply blank. His eyes slide off of them when he tries to focus, and none of them look at him.

He _knows_ none of them are looking at him.

After spending so much time at the institute, bowed beneath the weight of the Watcher’s gaze, the sudden absence of staring eyes is almost a relief. Of course, that can never last, and he soon remembers that isolation has its own weight.

This is not just the world of the Lonely; in his eyes, it is the world he tried to flee to, as a child running from his mother’s horrors. It is the world that chased him back to her.

He wants to scream, but what’s the point? No one will hear him.

_Jon would hear. Jon would come running._

The world seems to tremble at the thought. For a split second, the air that Gerard breathes in is warm.

But to think of Jon is to think of the hospital bed. Of the cold, wet dock that Gerard dragged his sodden body onto. The blood running from the wound on his forehead. The desperate futility of forcing breath into waterlogged lungs. The crack of cartilage breaking beneath his hands.

Jon _would_ come running. He would claw his way back into the fog that once took him, if it meant dragging Gerard from its grip. He would let the Lonely swallow him all over again, just for a _fraction_ of a chance. He would break himself if he thought it would save someone else.

He already has, for Gerard. He has done it before, and he will do it again in a heartbeat.

“I’m going to lose him,” he says out loud, and can barely hear himself over the murmur of the empty crowd.

If he goes back, he will lose Jon. If he stays here, he will lose Jon.

And isn’t that better, he thinks. Isn’t it better to return to the familiar now, before he gets anyone hurt.

Isn’t it better if the loss is only his.

* * *

There are statements that say that the world of the Lonely is just like this one, but slightly shifted. The buildings taller, more spread out, reminding each victim of how empty they are. The familiar is present only as a reminder of what has been lost.

There is no reason to believe that correlation is causation, that similarity means connection, but Jon has nothing else to work with. The statements are given by those who escaped the Lonely themselves, or would eventually succumb. As for he scant few who looked on from outside of it, who watched friends and acquaintances vanish into thin air?

They were _lucky_ to find traces left behind.

For the first time, Jon starts leaving the institute at hours others would consider reasonable. He still has work to do in research—if he lets that fall to the wayside, if he gives Elias a reason to fire him, then he can’t help Gerry. So he stays and works the bare minimum he can offer, and goes home to throw himself into his own research. He does not ask Gertrude’s permission to take statements out of the Archives. He does it, and she says nothing, and he does not stop. Folders and loose files clutter his flat, statement after statement of frightened people. Desperate, terrified people. Grieving people.

He finds Andrea Nunis’s statement when the silence of the flat creeps in, and on a whim he records it. He didn’t ask before borrowing a tape recorder, and until Gertrude scolds him personally, he’ll assume that he has her blessing.

It takes far too long to get to the part where Gerry steps into Andrea Nunis’s life and back out again. Jon reads that part as slowly as he can, as slowly as the Eye has patience for. When the memory of Andrea’s feelings flows through him, he can almost picture it in his mind as if remembering himself. It’s the closest he’s come to seeing Gerry outside of pictures since he disappeared. It is over too soon, and then Jon is left to finish the statement every bit as alone as its narrator was. There are no supplemental notes to add, and so he ends the recording and reads the statement again, silently.

He falls asleep over it, wakes up hours later from a dream of familiar hands holding his, the soft ends of long hair tickling his face, warmth just a whisper away. It’s gone as soon as his eyes are fully open.

* * *

Gerard has no way of knowing how long he has been here, before he creeps home—to the Lonely’s copy of his home—and finds a statement on the coffee table.

Statement of Loretta Jamison, originally given back in 2004. He skims over it, and his stomach twists. A quiet, neglected child, raised by a father and stepmother who pretended that she wasn’t there, until one day when she went off by herself to tour universities, and arrived on a campus to find it empty and labyrinthine.

He takes it as a taunt from the Lonely. When Owen Tanner’s statement about an endless empty highrise appears on the bedside table, he thinks the same thing. It’s still enough to make him stay, to keep him from wandering, because it’s something to look at that isn’t just the emptiness and the blank, ignorant crowds.

It’s only when they start to accumulate, when he realizes how cluttered the flat is (Jon would have a fit if he saw the state of it) that he begins to wonder. Statements are the Eye’s thing, not the Lonely’s. The fears may blend, but never like this, so why is he finding them here?

And then he lifts a sofa pillow and finds Harold Silvana’s statement tucked underneath, and his hands shake so badly as he picks it up that he nearly rips the pages in half.

He remembers the building in Pall Mall. He remembers the tunnels beneath it. He remembers being freshly eighteen and _stupid_. Stupid for thinking he knew any better than the poor builders stumbling into Smirke’s tunnels, stupid for hoping that embracing Mum’s world and bringing her Leitners would make her love him. A man was dead because of him, because he swung the hammer and led them into the tunnels, because he was too full of hope and cockiness and useless knowledge to understand what consequences were.

There are so many statements in the flat. He wonders if this is some unique torture method from the Lonely, as if he needs the reminder of why he’s always been better off in this place, where he can’t do any harm. As he wipes the tears away, he catches the faint scent of cigarette smoke on the paper. It’s the brand Jon prefers, the one Gerard likes well enough as long as they’re going to share.

He shoves the statement back under the pillow and leaves the room. When he looks again, the statement is gone. He finds it again on the kitchen table, beneath a single stone-cold cigarette stub.

He thinks about leaving. The part of him that longs to open the door and walk back out into the fog and emptiness is neither small nor quiet. The Lonely calls to him, sickly-sweet and cloying, tempting in its safety, in its familiarity, in being _good enough_. The pain it offers is gentle and muted. It will not tear him to bloody pieces in agony and violence. He will simply lose himself piece by piece, until he has faded away to nothing at all.

Gerard looks down at the statements on the coffee table, and sees #0102503 scrawled in the top corner in Gertrude’s spidery handwriting. He tears his eyes from it, the memory taunting him even as it soothes. He found Andrea Nunis when he was hiding from his mother’s ghost. Even when he was running from it, this world still caught up with him, luring him back with people to save, hapless unwary victims that he could pull from the jaws of fear, just to clumsily patch his own ragged edges.

(He remembers thinking, _if Mum finds me right now, she’ll kill this woman out of spite._ )

He looks at it again. There’s a new note scribbled in the margins.

_COME HOME_

It’s not Gertrude’s handwriting, but he recognizes it just as well. He tries to breathe. He can’t even hear himself gasp.

The statements surround him, scrawled with names that he only half-remembers. Harold Silvana and Andrea Nunis and Dominic Swain and Lesere Saraki and more still, people he encountered, people he helped, people whose blood is on his hands. And beyond them, countless people—ordinary people, with no terrible knowledge, no childhoods steeped in blood and fear—touching the Lonely and living to tell of it.

He sits among them, for—how long? He does not know. A few seconds, perhaps. A few hours. A few days, even.

He knows how they all did it, of course. He knows how to do it, too.

The fog calls to him, as sweet as a siren song. _I’m going to lose him,_ he reminds himself, the Lonely reminds him, and he knows that there will come a time when it will remind him again, and he won’t remember what he was supposed to lose. He’ll forget—

He’ll _forget Jon_ —

No. No, he’s not supposed to forget. He has—they made a precaution, after finding statements about a creature of the Stranger who stole lives and changed memories. He’s supposed to have it with him always, just in case—just in case he forgets what’s true—

He can see his breath as he reaches into his coat, as his searching hand closes around the tape in its handheld player, as he fumbles it out and feverishly presses play.

Papers rustling. No voices right away. This is not the recording they made after learning of the Not-Them, and terror grips Gerard for a split second before he hears him.

“ _Statement of Andrea Nunis, regarding a series of encounters in the streets of Genoa, Italy._ ”

Jon’s voice is weary and hoarse, and Gerard chokes on a sob at the sound of it. It’s so easy to lose whatever resolve made him chase the Lonely’s call. Remembering how to miss Jon is as easy as falling. The Lonely fights to keep him, but Jon’s voice is rough and heavy with an unspoken plea, soaked in the power of Beholding that burns the fog away.

* * *

Jon cannot remember the last time he properly slept. He’s surrounded himself with research, with statements, and when he closes his eyes, he can see them written in the darkness behind the lids.

Scattered among accounts of the Lonely are accounts of Gerry. Strangers whose lives he touched, people he saved from terrible fates. Maybe if Jon isn’t enough, they will be. Maybe the good that Gerry has done will be enough to pull him back into the world, if Jon can’t.

He’s sure his coworkers have noticed something wrong by now, but no one has approached to ask. It makes him wonder if this is just how he always looks when he buries himself deep in work, if his usual concentration is simply indistinguishable from the desperate, tireless energy that drives him now.

Either way, they leave him alone. So does Gertrude. With Gerry gone, there is no one else worth talking to. Perhaps it is ironic, that his will to beat the Lonely is driving him closer to it.

(Maybe that is what it will take in the end, maybe his last recourse will be to walk back in and find him in the fog—)

A tape clicks on.

Jon turns his burning eyes from the page in his hands, to the tape recorder. It sits on his coffee table, though Jon cannot remember if that was where he left it. His own voice plays back to him, and even with the Eye forcing Andrea’s fear into him as he recorded her statement, the voice on the recording sounds just as weary and beaten-down as Jon feels.

He shoves aside the work in front of him and moves closer to the recorder, taking it into his hands. He is tired, teetering on the edge of unconsciousness even as his desperation makes sleep impossible.

The recorder feels cold, damp, with finger marks in the moisture that clings to it. Jon knows that he hasn’t touched it since he recorded the statement.

“ _He was pale, scrawny almost, and looked utterly out of place,_ ” Andrea says in Jon’s voice. “ _His loose, bright shirt was in stark contrast to his long, black hair. He was staring at me…_ ”

All at once, Jon feels… on edge. In a literal sense, not just agitated or jumpy, but as if he stands at the edge of something, looking over, and seeing—what?

Something, someone, reaching up?

“Gerry,” he rasps out. “Gerry, _please_.”

Something falters, hesitates. Reaching hands nearly touch, fingertips barely brush. It’s there, he knows it, hesitating just beyond his reach.

Jon remembers the statements he’s read. He’s done nothing else for the past two weeks but read statements.

“I—” For a moment he can almost see his breath like mist in the air, as if the Lonely itself is trying to choke him before he can steal from it. “Please. Come back—come _home._

Reach.

 _“_ I love you,” he whispers. “ _I love you._ ”

Grasp, and pull.

He doesn’t feel the couch dip beside him. He doesn’t hear a rustle, or even a breath of disturbed air. Gerry is simply there, beside him, cold and shaking and pale from the lingering mists.

“... _the long rambling phone calls made whenever we got the chance. I closed my eyes and remembered in as much detail and with as much love as I could muster in my despair—_ “

Jon stops it, shoves it aside, and reaches across the space between them. Gerry’s face is ice-cold against his hand, and the noise he makes at the touch slips into the gap in Jon’s ribs like a blade. He drags himself closer, feels Gerry curl up against him, folding himself small until his head is pressed to Jon’s sternum. Jon wraps himself around him as best he can, shivering against the cold that still clings to Gerry like old cobwebs.

“I’m sorry.” Gerry’s voice is hoarse. Jon tries not to wonder whether it’s from lack of use or screaming. “I’m _sorry,_ Jon, I—”

“It’s alright,” Jon whispers into his hair. “It’s alright, I’m here. You’re here. You’re back. You’re okay.”

“I should’ve—It was so _easy_ to stay—”

“I know. I remember.”

Gerry pulls back, uncurls, and Jon’s heart twists at his pale, haunted face. He runs his hands along Gerry’s skin, presses Gerry’s face gently between them, hoping the warmth in them will chase away the cold. Gerry reaches out, his hand slips behind Jon’s head, thin fingers curl and tangle in his hair, and Jon follows the pull.

The kiss is a hungry, desperate thing. Jon loses himself in it, drowning just as thoroughly in this as he nearly did in the ocean, before Gerry was snatched beyond his reach. He is sick and tired of his fear feeding uncaring cosmic entities, and so he pours the rest into the kiss, along with all the love that he tried to fling into the Lonely like a lifeline. When they part for air, Jon can’t bring himself to go far. He presses his forehead to Gerry’s and lets it rest there as they breathe each other in.

“What about you?” Gerry rasps out. “You—are you alright?”

“What?” slips out before Jon remembers what happened before Gerry disappeared. The hospital, the dock—it feels as if he drowned years ago, not weeks. “Oh. Y-yes, I—yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—if I’d just been more careful, then maybe… maybe you wouldn’t have…”

Gerry hums softly. “Would’ve happened eventually,” he says. “The Lonely’s been after me for a long time.”

Jon doesn’t know what to say to that, so he simply holds him tighter.

He would be happy enough to stay like this for the rest of the day, to call into the institute and stay like this for the rest of the week, but then Gerry shifts again, pulls back but doesn’t let go. “Jon?”

“Yes?”

“Jon, look, I…” Gerry presses his lips together. “I just—you know that I…” His grip on Jon tightens, though not painfully. “I don’t—I got scared, seeing you like that, and—”

“Gerry, I’m _sorry_ —”

“Please let me finish,” Gerry cuts him off. Jon shuts his mouth. “I know, it’s—it’s not your fault, the stuff we do is dangerous, and neither of us had any way of knowing that would happen, so just… don’t apologize, just be more careful next time, that’s all.”

“Right,” Jon whispers. “Of course. I’m—I can do that. I will, I promise.”

“And—” Gerry tries again. “I just— _fuck_.” He lets his head fall to Jon’s shoulder. “God _damn_ it, why can’t I say it?”

“Gerry—”

“I’m sorry,” Gerry says. “I don’t know why it’s so hard, I just—”

“Gerry, it’s alright—”

“It’s _not_.” Gerry’s voice cracks. “Jon, I _heard_ you. I wanted to come back, but I wasn’t sure—and then I heard you say it, and that was all it took, and _what if I can’t say it when you need me?_ ”

Jon’s breath catches in his throat.

“I just—me too,” Gerry whispers. “What you said before. _Me too_.”

Jon pulls him close again, because what else is there to do?

“That’s—” His breath stutters again. “That’s enough. Gerry, that’s more than—that’s all I need to hear.”

“I’m sorry I can’t say it,” Gerry breathes into the crook of his neck.

“It’s alright,” Jon tells him. “It’s alright, you just did. I know now. And I won’t forget.” He presses his lips to Gerry’s forehead again, breathing in as the smell of fog and emptiness starts to fade. “I won’t forget.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] ariadne's string](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28550070) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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